With Allies Like These, Who Needs Oppressors?
Originally posted at Drunken Boat
Vanessa Place is tweeting the text of gone with the wind. The account features a photograph of actress Hattie McDaniel as “Mammy” for its profile photo, and an even more racially-charged illustration of the character as the header image. Vanessa Place is a white woman, repeating “the n-word” in white spaces.
The thing is this: I honestly believe that Place’s intention behind these works is not racist. (I do find it a bit ironic though, that the only way to defend her work is to defend her intentions. It runs pretty counter to the tenets of ConPo, at least as I understand them.). However, this clumsy deployment of racist language in the name of anti-racism clearly comes from a place of white privilege. As a white person, I know I have no right to reclaim the word n*gger. There is a vein with living blood pumping through it directly from those who gave that word its awful power to wound to my current position in American society. If those who have been harmed by that word wish to strip it of its power by claiming it for their own, let them do so. The effect is not the same coming from my lips.
Effect is what’s at issue here. Regardless of Place’s intentions, the net effect is more racist language shunted into the shared airspace. Was going after the target of this conceptual project–ostensibly to force the estate of Margaret Mitchell to sue Place herself, thus claiming their ownership of the racist work—really worth the collateral damage caused to the writers of color who happened to be standing in its blast radius?
Place has now provided an artist’s statement explaining that she believes this to be a necessary cruelty. But it is a cruelty only to those the original work was already cruel to. This is not cruel to the estate of Margaret Mitchell; they are obviously unfazed, as they have been since 2009 when she began the work. Place believes that by consciously acting out her role as an oppressor, she is making some kind of comment about it. The difference between her and actual racists is that she knows she’s being racist. Again, her intent behind the work—which she maintains it is her mandate as a conceptual poet not to explain—is the only thing that differentiates it from the unironic use of the same racist language.
I’m not here to debate whether this “is art” or not. I am starting from an assumption that this is, in fact art, just like Piss Christ or Grand Theft Auto V. It’s all art. That debate can feel free to rage on without me. Ravi from Drunken Boat contacted me to write a response to this current kerfuffle. Having published Place before, he reasoned, Drunken Boat is complicit, and want to create a space for dialogue by way of making amends. We are all complicit. We, especially white folks like myself, are born complicit. It is our duty to educate ourselves and try to do something about our complicity; we must actively reject the structures of white supremacy, or we passively perpetuate them just by our participation in The Way Things Are. When I say educate ourselves, I mean, above all: listen. Listen to People of Color tell their stories. Believe what they say. Try to compile a list of the last 10 books you read (or check your Goodreads, if you’re a nerd like me). How many of them were written by anyone other than white men?
As the person who posted the Change.org petition, my name and photograph ended up on it. The writers who helped draft the text I edited, the supporters of the petition, and I have since (predictably) been accused of censorship. Of silencing Vanessa Place.
You’ll note that nowhere in the text of that petition do we call for Place to delete her Twitter account, or for even for AWP to renounce her work. If we did, neither of these things would be censorship, or even silencing. Freedom of speech is not freedom from accountability. You have every right to say whatever offensive thing you want. We, as a community, have the same right to tell you you’re being an asshole. You have the right to make whatever art you want. You do not have a right to an audience for that art. Short of physical force, we, as an outraged community, with no institutional backing, are incapable of silencing an artist. Our single demand was that Place be removed from her position on the committee responsible for the selection of panels at AWP Los Angeles. A position, that, presumably, she was granted on the merits of her work as a poet—that work which displays such a complete ignorance of the realities of racism, even as she purports to be attempting to expose the same. This work does not reflect the kind of even-handed artist that AWP should be appointing to carry out its stated mission of diversity and inclusivity.
AWP, for their part, have removed Place from the committee. In their explanation they refer to the “controversy” surrounding Place’s work vis-a-vis her place on the committee. The word racism appears exactly zero times (go ahead and do a CTRL+F on that page. I’ll wait.). Most gallingly of all, in this non-apology, they feel the necessity to link to two theoretical examinations (written, naturally, by white men) of this and other conceptual poetry to provide “context.” As if what People of Color are lacking, in decrying their further marginalization, is context. The context of this work is not only the long-ago history of slavery and casual racism in the antebellum south. The context of this work is the century since, where white writers take it upon themselves to decide which cruelties are necessary. The context of this work is a War On Drugs, waged for profit by increasingly-militarized police forces and disproportionately targeting People of Color, who are gunned down by the hundreds and imprisoned by the hundreds of thousands. The context of this work is the ongoing structure of racial inequality that persists in a “color-blind” world, through opportunity hoarding, through dog-whistle politics, and the walls of social and cultural capital that let whites reap all the benefits of racial hierarchy without having to see the destruction it causes. There is an abundance of context for this racist work. That’s exactly the problem. More context isn’t the solution.
AWP denounces “controversy” without acknowledging that the controversy here is racism. Vanessa Place clearly seeks controversy. All this outcry, sadly, may simply be spun as part of the work Place hopes to accomplish. Meanwhile, the perpetrators of the racism she claims to be attacking sit comfortably, protected by the very same kinds of institutions and structures that now protect Place herself. As Amy King so succinctly put it: “you don’t get to pick the kind of controversy you want your art to court.”
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